Having current weather information is imperative for the safety of aircraft travel. Improved weather gathering systems allow for the sharing of real-time weather data as detected by an onboard weather radar (further referred as producer) to a ground center. This weather data may get processed (applying data fusion & prediction algorithms) and unified with other weather data at the ground station. This unified weather data may be up-linked to a subscribed aircraft (further referred as consumer). Hence, this system allows for the gathering and collating of weather information from a plurality of resources. In a typical system, a request for weather information is initiated from the ground (e.g. a global data center) and in response, an onboard weather radar sends the applicable weather data that has been requested. This data gets processed on the ground and further gets up-linked to the consumer aircraft where it is displayed on cockpit displays, electronic flight bag or tablet computer as an overlay. There are specific message formats defined for both up-link and down-link data. Data gets exchanged between the producers, ground data center and the consumers in these pre-defined data formats. For example, the up-link request may be a request for a particular weather phenomenon such as, hail, lightning, turbulence, wind shear etc. or it may be combination of one or more such weather phenomenon. In response, a producer responds back to the ground data center with the data that has been requested.
Based on need, getting required data from a preferred source aircraft may work well with such a ‘request-response’ protocol discussed above. However, there are deficiencies with this protocol. Firstly, the request from ground is made without the knowledge of what weather phenomenon is being detected by the onboard weather radar at the particular geographical location of interest. Secondly, only the data detected at the instance of receiving the request gets down-linked, and only for those parameters that have been requested. Thirdly, there lies a definite possibility that any of the critical weather data that has been detected (further referred as event) by the onboard weather radar might go unshared/down-linked, because there might not have been a ground request at that particular instance when there was an occurrence of critical weather event. Fourthly, ground data center prediction algorithms heavily rely on the accuracy and timeliness of the data as downlinked from the producer aircraft. The more current the data, the more accurate the weather prediction. Fifthly, with the existing protocol, significant ground data center processing is required. The processing needs to identify producers that could generate relevant data, make requests to those particular aircraft, get the data down-linked, fuse it and up-link to consumers. This processing is time consuming and could introduce latencies in providing data to the consumers. An alternate approach could be where producer aircraft down-link weather data continuously to a ground center without depending on any of the ground requests (i.e. streaming). However the data-link costs that incur in such type of continuous down-link can be large, especially keeping in view the volume of data that gets down-linked.
For the reasons stated above and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for a system to gather and disseminate critical weather information in an efficient and cost effective manner.